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What is the command? Or App?

Have a dialup modem and have spent hours bringing things up to date, way beyond my 7.2 disks, which I bought two months ago. So I want to back this work up and save it,
against the utter messup that newbies just seem to make.

Fresh Linux-formatted partition (hda1) for just this situation.
I think I need to backup home directory, and /etc and
poosibly even /root. (Would this save the updates,settings?)

Now, what app would do this best, and if a Terminal
command, I am still weak there. Would I have to do
it in sections of "cp X, cp Y, cp Z" or is there some amazing
ONE command that would do this?

Re:What is the command? Or App?

Fresh Linux-formatted partition (hda1) for just this situation.
I think I need to backup home directory, and /etc and
poosibly even /root. (Would this save the updates,settings?)

Yeah updating a clean 7.2 install can be fun with a modem. Alot of updates are out for it. If you used up2date to update your system the rpm's it downloads are in /var/spool/up2date.

I would backup /home, /etc, and /var/spool/up2date at least.

You could use tar and bzip2 for this.

tar -cjvf whatever.tar.bz2 /etc /home /var/spool/up2date

I was going to play with improving my bash scripting skills and write a script for this that will let you select the directories you want to backup and exclude certain files or directories. I will get around to this soon I hope. ;D

Re:What is the command? Or App?

Okay, as I see it, here are my steps, guys, and THANKS,
really for helping..

I would 1)Name my partition "Backup", possibly
2) After establishing what needs to be backed
up, which looks like Home directory, /etc, and possibly
/root and ???
3) copy these to a folder and/or TAR them

Re:What is the Additional Problem

You could use tar and bzip2 for this.

Except that I put the cart before the horse. Unexpected detour. I made the partition, but Linux can't see it, hda1, and so I can't even mount it. And I need to rename it, but I can't mount it to rename it, or is it rename it to remount it?
It's confusing...Like a Catch-22. Anybody here old enough
to know what that is? Okay, so I'm an old newbie!
So, I'm getting to be a cranky old newbie...don't want
to pass on before I get it running...

Re:What is the command? Or App?

Jim and others,
I successfully added the partition.
But it was ext2...Hadn't seen your reply here yet.
When I tried to just change the /fstab (newbie thinking)
to read ext3 and did a reboot, I got a lot of RED.
So I changed it back to ext2, and haven't seen a
problemmounting.
But haven't actually tried to copy anything to it yet.
And when I came back here, found this answer on
how to make the partition ext3...
Is this necessary? If so, Jim, thanks for anticipating my
problem. (I used Partition Commander to format the
partition and it doesn't have an ext3 option,btw.)